WebRender newsletter #37

Hi! Last week I mentioned picture caching landing in nightly and I am happy to report that it didn’t get backed out (never to take for granted with a change of that importance) and it’s here to stay.
Another rather hot topic but which didn’t appear in the newsletter was Jeff and Matt’s long investigation of content frame time telemetry numbers. It turned into a real saga, featuring performance improvements but also a lot of adjustments to the way we do the measurements to make sure that we get apple to apple comparisons of Firefox running with and without WebRender. The content frame time metric is important because it correlates with user perception of stuttering, and we now have solid measurements backing that WebRender improves this metric.

Notable WebRender and Gecko changes

Bobby did various code cleanups and improvements.

Chris wrote a prototype Windows app to test resizing a child HWND in a child process and figure out how to do that without glitches.

11 thoughts on “WebRender newsletter #37”

Webrender is already part of Firefox beta for Nvidia GPU on windows desktops and can be enforced by using the environment variable MOZ_WEBRENDER=1.
I am wondering though, how is this webrender implementation updated? Does it get updates with every beta or only once? Will picture caching be part of the next beta?

Is there a place where we could see performance benchmarks with and without WebRender ? During electrolysis and the Quantum effort that led to Firefox 57 we could see how this all evolved, it would be nice to watch that for WebRender too.

We have a somewhat unusual setup for how we interact with the window, where the browser process creates the window handle and the GPU process renders into it. We are getting some glitches during resizes so we are testing out different ways to fix it.